CD-ROM playback stutter

JimboJangles

JimboJangles

New Member
My uncle is having some issues with his CD-ROM and DVD drives functioning together. I haven't had a chance to look at it myself quite yet, but he explains the problem better than I can here:
Computer is running Windows 2000 Pro, 512MB RAM, two (2) hard drives, and two (2) optical drives. The two (2) HDD's are on the Primary IDE cable (80 pin) and the two (2) optical drives are on the Secondary IDE cable (40 pin).

Originally, I had a CD burner & DVD Burner and they both worked flawlessly. I removed the CD burner and put a Sony CD-ROM in it's place. The drives are on the same cable configured as master and slave. They do not play correctly now. They stutter and skip. The DVD Burner is a Sony DVD RW DRU-710A and the CD-ROM is a Sony CDU5221. I believe the DVD Burner is using the latest firmware and drivers, but the CD-ROM is driverless and does not support upgrades.

Some further experimenting has brought some other issues to light. Neither of the drives can correctly play a homemade disc perfectly, but a commercially recorded disc plays perfectly in the CD-ROM drive. The same disc does not play well in the DVD drive. The track will eventually even out and sound okay, but when it advances to the next song the problem (stuttery sound) begins again for a time. Could all this be a cabling issue, maybe putting a hard drive and an optical drive on the same cable. What do you think?
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If possible, go back to the original configuration and see if the problem persists.

Also, I seem to recall Windows 2000 being very particular with IDE channels, sometimes switching over from DMA to PIO mode. This can be seen under device manager and properties for each controller, if I remember correctly.
 
I have checked the DMA mode of the drives, for this system-it is a BIOS setting (there's not a setting I could find going through Device Manager). I did notice the other day that the stuttering happens in conjunction with the hard drive light flashing (which hard drive is being accessed, I don't know). The light is flashing rather frequently and at times that seem unexplainable, like when using a CD disc drive. I'm going to move the data off the drive I added, remove it from the system, and see what happens. I have a new wrinkle though. Sunday evening I was using the computer, had an external drive connected to it doing some housekeeping tasks. All of a sudden I got a BSOD, it did a memory dump, and rebooted. Problem was that the POST did not see the drives and of course the system could not boot (dreaded BOOT FAILURE) - at this point I decided to give it a rest. I booted it up last night and after it automatically checked the consistency of the drives, it went right to the Windows logon screen. I had other things to do and went no further. I don't know if it was a freak occurrence or if it is truly a sign of a failing hard drive.
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He sent me this today... sounds a bit grim to me, but I would think he's in need of an OS reinstall as opposed to it being a serious hardware issue.
Thoughts?
 
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